Australia needs to talk about Donald Trump: he’s not going away

What should Australia do about Donald Trump?

The almost complete absence from our election campaign of foreign affairs, defence policy and national security means that, at a time of intensified national discussion, we are not considering some of the issues that will affect our fortunes most profoundly.

One among these is the pos­sible election of Trump as president of the US. This is no longer a subject for jokes, or even for moral judgments, though no one could have a lower opinion of Trump than I do. It is instead a serious national policy challenge. I hope the best brains in our public service are starting to give it consideration.

It is still likely Trump will not be president. But Hillary Clinton is a feeble, weak and unattractive frontrunner.

The reasons for the rise of Trump are fascinating but beside the point for Australian policy.

Like many people professionally concerned with foreign affairs, I’ve gone through the five stages of grief over a Trump presidential candidacy: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I am just now moving from depression to acceptance.

Because Trump has a real chance at the presidency — perhaps a 30 to 40 per cent chance — Bill Shorten was gravely ill advised to describe Trump’s policies as “barking mad”. It was in fact very irresponsible. Malcolm Turnbull was right to rebuke Shorten. Turnbull’s measured conservatism on this matter is well judged.

Commentators and former politicians can say what they like. Potential prime ministers have to consider how they cope with a Trump presidency.

This will involve much more than just how we deal directly with a Trump administration. We may be one of relatively few important countries that Trump doesn’t have a beef with. Americans don’t pay for our security. They don’t directly defend us in the way they do South Korea or Japan. We have a big trade deficit with the US so there won’t be any trade complaints. And we are popular, in so far as any foreign country is popular, with the American electorate, including the cohorts who are most prone to backing Trump — conservative white guys.

However, our regional interests could be significantly damaged by a President Trump. The three most important elements of our national security are our alliance with the US; the overall system of US alliances in Asia that has underwritten regional stability; and the liberal trading order in Asia that the US has backed and that has allowed Asian societies to become richer, more middle class and more stable.

The second and third of these could be under grave threat from Trumpism. He has expressed extreme scepticism about the US alliances with Japan and South Korea, demanded they pay large sums to Washington for their alliances and suggested they could look after themselves and acquire their own nuclear weapons if they didn’t pay up. On trade, he has promised a veritable trade war with China, with which the US had a trade deficit of more than $360 billion last year.

Weakened US alliances and a trade war would be pretty disastrous for Australia. So what could we do about it? The first thing would be to try to persuade a Trump administration not to take these actions, or to take the mildest versions of them it could manage. We might not be successful in such persuasion but we shouldn’t underestimate our influence either. We certainly won’t be able to do anything if our government joins in a global liberal jihad of Trump bashing. As I say, commentators can say what they like about Trump, especially before he’s elected. Governments, and those who aspire to lead governments, must be much more careful in the way they speak because they will need to build relationships to protect Australian interests.

The overriding diplomatic task for an Australian government with a Trump administration would be to get it to continue to invest credibility in its security ­relationships generally, but we also would need to expend effort in reinforcing our own security ­alliance.

We are friends and allies with the US in good times and in bad. A Trump presidency may very well present a crisis for America’s position in the world.

If US influence in Asia is in some decline, or if the US simply retrenches to some extent from the region, it does not follow automatically that our response should be to distance ourselves from the new administration in Washington. Of course we won’t follow it down any disastrous policy holes. All through the history of our alliance with the US we have been entirely independent and have had plenty of policy matters on which we have disagreed with Washington and taken a different course. Nonetheless, the US alliance is absolutely fundamental to our national security.

Therefore, in the face of a US pullback, one of our objectives is to make sure the Americans don’t pull back from us, that they come to define their relationship with Australia as a core US national interest, that we become part of their irreducible minimum.

If the US abandons some interests in Asia, we don’t want to be one of the interests it abandons.

Another huge diplomatic task for us will be to try to influence the way other governments, especially Asian governments, view a Trump administration. We would argue with other governments that they not throw out more than a century of US strategic credibility in Asia because of one very difficult president.

Some roster of similar considerations is now playing out in the minds of mainstream US Republicans who have done their feeble best to stop Trump. Many are genuinely torn by opposing impulses: one, to continue to oppose him root and branch because so much that he has said is so utterly discreditable, if not bizarre and dangerous; and two, accepting the possibility that he might succeed after all and it would be much better if there were mainstream people in his camp rather than just carpetbaggers and nutters.

Trump is a continuing source of amazement for commentators, but for governments, and aspiring governments, he should also be a matter of deadly serious policy.